When a multibillion dollar project collapses because of a basic mistake, the damage is measured not only in money but in credibility. Around the world, officials are confronting the fallout from what one expert aptly described as a “serious logical error,” a phrase that captures both a technical flaw and a deeper failure of judgment. I see the same pattern repeating across defense programs, digital security and public works: leaders racing ahead on grand designs while overlooking the simple checks that could have saved them from humiliation.
From a submarine that cannot safely leave port to war plans blasted into the wrong chat, the recent record reads like a cautionary tale about how power handles complexity. The stakes range from wasted budgets to national security risks, yet the root causes are strikingly similar, whether the setting is a naval shipyard, a secure messaging app or a construction site.
The $10 billion logic trap
In the technology world, the phrase “logic error” usually evokes a bug ticket, not a catastrophe. Yet one detailed account of a sprawling security rollout describes a $10 billion misstep that began with a simple misalignment between policy and implementation. Security teams pushed out controls faster than engineers could realistically adopt them, then treated the resulting noncompliance as proof that even more controls were needed. The loop fed on itself until the organization was spending at industrial scale to enforce rules that its own systems could not practically follow.
What makes that saga so telling is not only the price tag but the mindset. A Forex specialist who chronicled the episode framed it as a warning about how complex risk models can blind decision makers to basic cause and effect. Instead of asking why developers were bypassing tools, leaders assumed bad faith and doubled down. The “serious logical error” was not a single line of code, it was the belief that more process would automatically produce more safety, even as evidence mounted that the opposite was happening.
Spain’s $680 million submarine that could not surface
Few stories capture the public imagination like a warship that cannot do its job. In Oct, reports from Spain described a flagship submarine program that ran aground on a basic calculation mistake. Spain just spent $680 million on a submarine that cannot swim, a vessel so overweight that it reportedly risked not resurfacing if it dived. For a country that had billed the project as a leap in naval capability, the revelation was more than a technical glitch, it was a national embarrassment.
Officials were left to explain how One of Spain’s largest defense splurges could be undone by a math error that should have been caught in early design reviews. The figure of $680 m became shorthand for a broader critique of procurement culture, where optimistic assumptions and political pressure can override engineering caution. I see in that saga the same logical flaw that haunts big software projects: a belief that scale and prestige can compensate for skipped fundamentals.
War plans, Signal chats and a “Media Error”
The cost of logical failure is even starker when the subject is war. Earlier this year, Trump administration officials planning strikes in Yemen managed to expose their own deliberations by mismanaging a group chat. According to one account, national security adviser Mar conversations about targeting the Houthis unfolded in a Signal thread that included senior aides and military planners. In a basic operational lapse, a high profile journalist was added to that thread and began receiving messages about potential U.S. strikes as if he were part of the team.
The journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, later recounted how he was invited to connect with national security adviser Michael Waltz and initially assumed the texts could not be real. Another account described the episode bluntly as a Media Error, noting that Trump administration officials accidentally included him in a group chat where they discussed secret war plans with National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. The humiliation here was not only that sensitive information leaked, but that it did so through a consumer app that officials themselves had chosen as a supposedly secure backchannel.
Oaths, Signal and the Constitution of the United States
The Yemen episode also raised a deeper question about how senior figures understand their obligations. Every official involved in that Signal conversation had taken a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the. Yet they chose to hash out potential strikes in a chat that mixed official business with informal banter and, as it turned out, an unintended outside observer. The logical error here was ethical as much as procedural: treating the oath as compatible with casual digital habits that exposed military personnel to added risk.
One detailed critique argued that Every participant in that thread helped create, by definition, a threat to both national security and the troops who would have carried out any strike. I find that framing important because it links the abstract language of constitutional duty to the concrete choice of which app to use and whom to add. When senior figures treat secure planning as just another group chat, they are not only courting embarrassment, they are redefining what their oath means in practice.
Grid coordinates, hearings and the price of being wrong
Logical errors are not confined to war rooms and code repositories. In public works, a single wrong coordinate can derail years of planning. Earlier this year, Today‘s hearing in the Philippines was set to tackle allegations that former public works secretary Manuel Bonoan sent incorrect grid coordinates to Malaca. The allegation is straightforward and damning: that a senior official transmitted wrong location data for a major project, potentially steering resources and construction to the wrong place.
Even before any finding of guilt, the fact that such a hearing is necessary underscores how fragile large infrastructure efforts can be. A single mis-specified coordinate can mean roads that do not connect, bridges that miss their intended landing points or utilities that arrive where they are not needed. In that sense, the alleged mistake by Jan’s former secretary is part of the same story as the submarine and the war chat: a reminder that in complex systems, the smallest logical slip can unravel the largest plans.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
